Culture as a battlefield
The Cultural Revolution began in the cultural world. One of its first targets in 1965 and 1966 was a historical play by the writer and Beijing official Wu Han, which critics claimed was a disguised attack on Mao Zedong. From there the campaign widened to theatre companies, film studios, publishing houses, art academies and universities. By 1967, the second year of the movement, the old cultural establishment had largely been dismantled, and a narrow set of officially approved works filled the space it left.
The key figure in this process was Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who had held no significant public role before the 1960s but was given authority over the arts in the mid-1960s. She promoted a style of revolutionary theatre that she believed could replace both traditional Chinese drama and Western-influenced art.
The Four Olds
In August 1966, Red Guards were encouraged to attack the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. In practice this meant raids on homes, temples, libraries and museums. Books were burned, antiques smashed, and religious buildings damaged or closed. Individuals suspected of keeping “feudal” or “bourgeois” objects, such as paintings, classical music records or foreign novels, could be beaten, humiliated or have their homes ransacked.
The wave of destruction was at its worst in late 1966, but it continued in many places through 1967 as the Red Guards turned on one another and the movement became more factional. Cultural relics were lost, and some officials, including Premier Zhou Enlai, are reported to have intervened to protect certain sites, though the protection was uneven. The long-term effect was the loss of a large amount of material heritage, and a break in the transmission of skills and traditions.
Attacks on writers and artists
Many of China’s best-known writers, actors, painters and musicians were denounced during these years. Some were paraded and beaten at public criticism sessions, sent to labour camps or farms, or imprisoned. A number died: the novelist Lao She, for example, was found drowned in a Beijing lake in August 1966 after being beaten in public, and his death is often cited as a symbol of the persecution of intellectuals. Others, including Ba Jin, were criticised and silenced for years.
The writers’ associations, literary journals and art schools were closed or taken over. Most publications ceased, and literature in the ordinary sense almost disappeared from print. The works that were published were mostly political texts, official poetry and reprints of Mao’s writings. Foreign novels, classical Chinese literature and most Western music were treated as suspect, and playing or owning them could bring serious trouble.
The eight model works
What replaced the old repertoire was a small group of stage works that Jiang Qing and her allies promoted as the proper form of revolutionary art. They became known as the eight model works. They were five revolutionary Peking operas, two ballets and a symphonic piece:
- Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy
- The Red Lantern
- Shajiabang
- Raid on the White Tiger Regiment
- On the Docks
- The Red Detachment of Women (ballet)
- The White-Haired Girl (ballet)
- Shajiabang (symphonic version)
In 1967, especially around the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Mao’s Yan’an talks on literature and art in May, these works were presented as the model for everything else. The name model operas is often used loosely for the whole group. They typically featured heroic workers, peasants or soldiers, clear contrasts between good and evil, and brightly lit, stylised staging. Heroes were given central positions, and villains were portrayed as grotesque. The music mixed Chinese opera traditions with Western orchestration.
The works were performed repeatedly in theatres, broadcast on radio and made into films. Local troupes were expected to imitate them, and ordinary people learned the songs. For years, almost no other new full-length stage works were allowed. Audiences had little choice, and the repetition is why many Chinese people who lived through the period remember them vividly, some with nostalgia for the music, others with weariness.
Film and the visual arts
Cinema suffered in a similar way. Many films made before 1966 were banned as “poisonous weeds”, and their directors and actors were attacked. Production slowed sharply, and the studios later released mostly filmed versions of the model works. Painting and poster art were focused on portraits of Mao, scenes of revolutionary struggle and images of cheerful workers and peasants. Individual styles and traditional landscape painting were discouraged. Artists who had trained in older schools were often sidelined.
Elsewhere in the communist world, writers faced their own difficulties. At the Czechoslovak Writers Union congress of June 1967, for example, writers openly criticised censorship, something unimaginable in China at the time. In the Soviet Union, Soviet dissidents had been pressing against official control of literature. China’s cultural scene was moving in the opposite direction, toward a nearly single source of approved content.
Legacy
After Mao’s death in 1976 and the fall of Jiang Qing and her allies, the model works were gradually put aside and the old repertoire returned. The 1980s brought a revival of literature, much of it dealing with the damage of the Cultural Revolution years, known as scar literature. Mao’s image meanwhile became a global pop symbol, and Andy Warhol made his well-known Mao silkscreens in 1972. The model works themselves are still debated: some musicians and scholars have praised the craft involved, while others remember them as instruments of control. Both views can be true, and the history of the period suggests that it is hard to judge the art apart from the context in which it was imposed.